You might think why would I want to support these guys making some games, and you are in your right to think that. Yet to answer that question we need to tell you more about us, not the game, but the team, or teams behind this project.

REalM is being developed by two teams:

Arbor Sheep: which is comprised of two art students and a freelancer musician.

Authentic Illusions (from JARA A.I. Solutions): which is made of Ph.D. Students in the area of Artificial Intelligence(AI).

The guys from Arbor Sheep, as mentioned, are students. They have responsabilities to their University, but they also need to pay the bills. They have works to do so, and it limits much the time they can dedicate to bringing this project to life. And even in such circumstances, their effort is incredible. They love this game so much that their free time is being dedicated to making it see the day of light.

Long story short, for TheAudio, Chaös and Ruperto to be able to put their full efforts on the project, they need to be able to, at least partially substitute their job to follow their passion.

Now, from our side, we at JARA are very lucky to be in the position we are. We are agroup of guys who follow their passion, and from this passion to AI and videogames, our company idea was selected at our university(ITESM), for incubation, granting us lots of help on legal ground, as well as courses on different topics to make it flourish and be a self sustainable company by the time we graduate. Note that being incubated doesn't mean that they give us money, only support (which actually has a very high value both in money and experience), so don't think we run on a big budget by a University.

Yes, the photo is pretty bad, but we don't take much selfies XD (Rider and Lex)

Eventhough we are very blessed, it also means we carry lots and lots of work. We are full time Ph.D. students in Artificial Intelligence, and we are also full time employees in our own company. We earn money as research assistants at Tec de Monterrey, and are even allowed to direct that research to the well fare of our company, but we are investing that on JARA. There is an office's rent to pay, operation expenses to cover and of course, our own lives to mantain. Yes we consider ourselves very blessed to be in the position we are, but our weeks are very long and the time to rest is little and precious.

So, we can cover our personal expenses and basic stuff of the company, but we cannot cover marketing, pay TheAudio and the rest, or hire more help to make REalM a reality. If you can help us with a pre-order, or even by sharing our facebook page with your friends, you would have helped us a lot. If we start raising money for the game, we start marketing better and reach more people.

We don't aim to make millions, only to make a living. We want to follow our passion. We need to share our dreams with everyone else out there.

So, TLTR, if you think you can help us by making a pre order, trust us, we are going to spend that money on making a great game. If you can't, be sure to spread the word with all your friends on Facebook or twitter.

First of all, if you are here, thank you for taking the time to read this. In here we'll try to post weekly updates to the advances of REalM.

After a full weekend of work, we could finally set up the foundation to show REalM to the world. Some concept art, some gameplay (which is to be unveiled in the next week tentatively), some actual in-game animations and some more art (don't worry, you'll get to see everything) is what currently comprises REalM.

Currently we have walk, idle and jump animations, which are unique to each side (left, right, no mirrors), that in full make an outstanding 276 sprites (30 for walking, 46 for idle and 62 for the complete jump animation, for each side).

As to how is the game play going? We back at JARA(parent of Authentic Illusions, or rather AI is the video game division at JARA) had worked on an 2D animation engine for Unity, so we are ahead in that department, or so we thought.

After starting to put up Iris' animations on Unity using our tool, we realized that it wasn't as good as initially thought. Since we are no art developers, there were things we didn't considered when making such tool. We couldn't handle looping from a middle sprite in the animation, and always ended the animation on the last sprite (except when told to stop).

Although we had a StopWithInertia() method to let animations blend in better without abruptly changing, the fact that the animation ended on the last sprite ment that if the right button where to be pressed by error, the full animation would play (you could walk left with no problem, but if you wanted to stop, Iris would just keep walking).

Not only that, but when changing direction, animations would just start over, which was not that obvious when walking for example, but when jumping, changing direction mid air ment the animation would just start over. The last straw was the fact that we had no way of knowing when to play the landing animation part of the jump.

So we passed the week practically leveling up the animation code, and after a few days of hard work, it finally shined. The Unity tool had so much changes that by this point we could even say its a 2.0 version. Managing animations from now on would be a breeze (after that curve ball of jump animation that we had absolutely no idea how to make work with the previous code, the tool is now prepared).

The following image only presents the animation, the level it is in is not part of the game.

As for the actual controller for Iris, some weeks back we were working on a platformer controller tool for Unity. After the changes to the animation tool, the controler was also upgraded to be able to cope with the changes, and the needs. The controller specifies the current state of the character, and we actually never though about a landing state. So the changes made to them made possible to have a working, playable version of Iris. Nevertheless, since we are still finishing the showcase level, we can't show Iris' actual movements.

The final part of the week included making the Facebook page and the website, and finally, writing the first entry in the Developers Diary.

Well, it was a long week, if you got here(after reading everything ¬¬), thanks if not, well also thank you for visiting our page, have an excellent day :D

If you have any comments, you can sound them off here or in the forums. - Lex